Introduction to Salesforce

I’m going to talk about Salesforce for a brief moment. I’ll write a whole host of how-to guides and walkthroughs in the future but for now I just wanted to introduce the platform and its capabilities.

Salesforce is a cloud computing company from the United States, providing customer relationship management solutions (CRM) through its many offerings, the primary being the Salesforce platform. The platform provides a wide variety of functions including an interface for companies to track customer journeys through the sales cycle, as well as managing the service function through case and task management. The system also streamlines business processes through automation, and notifies users of important events and priorities via notification and email alerts. Reporting and dash-boarding tools are also included to extract data, helping to measure performance and visualise critical trends. All customer information is brought together in a highly integrated platform which can be fully customised to align to any particular business model.

The CRM is roughly broken down into a number of segments, each providing a particular business solution. Some of these are listed below.

Sales Cloud

Service Cloud

Marketing Cloud

Community Cloud

Wave Analytics

One of the great things about Salesforce is the online help available to users. The service provides a great range of tutorials and guides which extensively cover the functionality available within the platform. The online community is also very self serving, with users around the globe contributing to the improvement of the system, as well as providing answers to questions posted by their peers. If you don’t know how to do something on Salesforce, it’s highly likely that a solution to your problem has already been provided by the Salesforce community online.

Another benefit to the platform is the appexchange where thousands of both first-party and third-party apps and plug-ins are available (some for free, some at a cost) which can be integrated with Salesforce. These provide a variety of solutions, such as highlighting duplicate records, interfacing with Excel, or allowing in platform sales calls, to help create further value and aid efficiencies within your processes.

That’s it for now. I hope this has served as a fairly concise introduction to Salesforce by highlighting its components and key benefits. If you’re new to the platform, why not sign up for a Salesforce Developer account here: https://events.developerforce.com/signup and take a look. The Trailhead is also a very useful resource for learning everything Salesforce. This can be found here: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/.